In general, bread has been made through many steps of charging ingredients, mixing, first fermentation, division, benching, molding, final proofing and baking or frying in oil. Such breadmaking requires a long time, usually about 2 to 7 hours over a period from charge of ingredients to baking. To save time and labor in bakeshops, demand for a frozen or chilled bread dough has been increasing in recent years. In that case, the frozen or chilled dough can be supplied to bakeshops by a large-scale breadmaking factory in a cold chain system. The bakeshops can subject such frozen or chilled dough to final proof and baking to serve timely a consumer with delicious bread hot from an oven.
However, the frozen or chilled bread doughs suffer from the disadvantages that there occurs in a baked bread a white blister-like spot which is called "fisheyes" and there is insufficient swelling of bread which leads to reduced volume of bread. Such fisheyes often occur especially in a lean bread containing lesser amounts of sugars, oils and fats or the like, such as French bread. The baked products having fisheyes are unpleasant in appearance which results in much reduced commercial value. Those fisheyes are particularly evident in case where a dough is frozen and subsequently chilled or in case where a dough is only chilled.
Now it has been proposed to incorporate glycerol fatty acid esters and/or esters of glycerol fatty acid esters with organic acids into a chilled bread dough for preventing fisheyes from the occurrence in a baked product (Japanese Patent Kokai 63-152935). This process may provide lesser occurrence of fisheyes but has the drawbacks of insufficient bread swelling leading to reduced volume of bread.